Showing 1 - 10 of 12
In our online rants, avoid Satan's traps
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 23/09/2017
» Extremism is the work of shai'tan, said my friend who just returned from haj, using the Arabic word for "Satan". Ignore it if you can, he warned me, "or you'll fall into its trap".
Cyber snoop bill caps off a year from hell
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/12/2016
» It's a contest no one wants to win: Is 2016 the worst year ever?
Noble quest to ease misery is not IS support
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 26/11/2016
» In 2011 Naiem Wongkasorn crossed the border from Turkey into Syria. The civil war had already plunged the country into chaos and it was just before the Islamic State (IS) swept across the land on their evil rampage. Travelling with two Thai friends and some Turkish NGO workers, Naiem found himself in the town of Idlib in northeastern Syria. They were there to donate money raised from Thai donors to the refugee camps.
Voices of hate louder than the majority
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/11/2015
» After Paris, it has been a week of heartbreak. Not again, the godless killings, the barbarians at the gate! It has also been a week of blanket accusations, of Islam-bashing, and of frantic apologies from 1.5 billion peaceful people who’re told that what they’ve believed all their lives is making them inherently evil, only they don’t know it yet (the accusers know it).
Swatting away visions of refugee hell
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 05/09/2015
» This week the drowned Syrian boy rattles the conscience of Europe — and hopefully the oil-rich Arab nations — while in Bangkok, the Uighur fiasco keeps sending repercussions. In Europe, fierce debates ring across parliaments from the UK to Hungary as to whether countries should take in more refugees to cushion this humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, true to form, the Thai police awarded themselves with cash even though the suspects haven’t been tried and while every suggestion that the Erawan blast was connected with our foul deportation of 109 Uighurs in July is adamantly deflected, as if with fly swatters.
In fighting IS, don't mimic its evil ways
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 07/02/2015
» It was a sad week, a week of satanic beheadings, then the barbarous immolation, executed and filmed by that godless bunch as if in mockery of Hollywood war movies. A week of moral anger and global blood lust, from Amman to Tokyo by way of Iraq. A week of sadness that quickly morphed into something like vengeance, as war cries sounded over the medieval fortresses of Jordan and Egypt and echoed to the South China Sea.
We're in the news, and it's not all okay
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/01/2015
» ‘So what’s happening in your country?”
The silence on Israel is deafening
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 02/08/2014
» With Gaza blitzed and bombed, with the harrowing death toll despite the 72-hour ceasefire, with the weeping drowned out by the shelling of schools while the children were sleeping — even with the pause in atrocity, who would still believe in the Biblical story of David against Goliath?
Putting limits on freedoms to the test
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 21/09/2013
» Freedom is coveted, demanded, dreamt of, fought for, and yet elusive in practice and definition. The discrepancy in understanding what freedom is and entails is at the centre of our difficult times, or at one of the centres.
Silly 'Arab' soap opera lights the fires of mistrust
News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 24/08/2013
» The Middle East becomes a scene of a great romance. The people are cool. The camels are cute. The sky is blue, boundless, and the smooth ridges of the sand dunes are as seductive as the chiselled face of the beardless Muslim sheikh, whose handsome head is wrapped in a chequered keffiyeh.